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Yesterday and today I was honored to be interviewing candidates for 2 positions at our school. Honored, yes, because in these trying economic times the candidates came to us with incredible resumes. Teacher positions are hard to come by and only the best (or luckiest) are getting hired. Add to that the fact that our school is considered to be a great school, where innovators of education reside, and there really isn’t a dearth of applications.
If they threw out that their school had 80% Low SES (an indicator of students on free or reduced lunch) I could pull up those statistics to see if they were trying to sway us with these numbers (again, none were wrong). And, I could instantly see that there were some things (all good) that hadn’t really been pushed to the forefront. One candidate was the Head Baseball Coach at his high school and another was on the U.S. Paralympic Team at the Nagano Olympics and brought home a Medal!
Should we have had time to do a more extensive study of our candidates I would have checked their Twitter stream (if they had one), their LinkedIn Profile (if…), or their Facebook Profile and status. Because that’s where we are these days. Nothing is, or should be, a secret unless it is so small it is insignificant. For example our district is pretty conservative. Although what you do in your private life is of little importance to me, there are people who would take offense to what you do if you are involved in something that’s, say, less than Christian.
And so we forwarded a couple of names to our principal and one of those will become part of our Manor New Tech staff. We feel very blessed because there wasn’t one candidate that I interviewed that I wouldn’t be happy to work with. When I find out the selection I’ll have to invite them to twitter and Facebook and see if they are the type I would send a Google + account to. Only then will we really be connected as a co-teacher.